How football lost its soul

Looking back, it has the quality of madness. In the unseasonably warm and unimaginably chilling spring of 2020, with the country and the planet in the teeth of that first, savage bite of the pandemic, the amount of time dedicated and energy expended in ensuring that football could resume as quickly as possible might charitably be described as excessive.

Given how hostile and alien the world felt at that point, maybe we could be forgiven for failing to grasp quite how extreme were the measures put in place to restore the game to our television screens. At five years’ remove, in the megawatt beam of hindsight, it is possible to see more clearly.

It is hard to say which element of lockdown football was most extraordinary. The substitutes wearing N95 respirator masks, maybe? The edict that actually banned hugging? The fact that someone came up with the concept of allowing players to train “while maintaining social distancing” and nobody pointed out the absurdity of it? David Goldblatt, the sport’s academic historian of choice, offers a less obvious but equally convincing contender: the dedication with which engineers at various TV networks attempted to perfect the artificial crowd noise that provided an uncanny broadcast soundtrack to matches held in silent stadiums. By the time fans were starting to appear in stands once more, he writes, they could “vary the intensity and length” of each sound effect so that a “last-minute missed equaliser” sounded different to a “half-chance in the first 15 minutes”. Given how much time, thought and technical expertise would have been required to achieve this, it is easy to think it was all a lot of effort for what is, deep down, just a game.

Except, of course, it isn’t just a game. That is why Boris Johnson, then prime minister, could insist that the return of the Premier League would be good for the nation’s morale; it is why, while football was an afterthought during both world wars, when a national emergency struck in 2020, “such was the game’s popularity, power and financial heft” that the government “went out of its way to ensure its continuation”.

It is hard to overstate the role football plays in modern culture. Both Goldblatt and the historian Tom Holland – it is not clear who said it first, so let’s credit them both – have described football fandom in the 21st century as the most widely practised pastime in the history of humankind; it is not, in all likelihood, an exaggeration.

That sentiment is perhaps better understood on a more personal scale: as the Athletic’s Jack Pitt-Brooke noted on an episode of the Libero podcast, football is now a cultural form that one must opt out of, rather than into. Certainly among men, those who do not care for it often actively declare their lack of allegiance; liking football is almost, now, seen as the default position.

Last month, across the BBC and ITV, some 16.2 million people watched England beat Spain to retain the Women’s European Championship. No television event this year will come close to those figures. More people in the UK watched the broadcast of the final of Euro 2020 – in which England’s men lost to Italy – than the wedding of Charles and Diana (31 million compared with 28 million), despite the fact the distractions of Netflix and YouTube did not exist in 1981. Football, almost alone, stands exempt from the breakdown of communal consumption that has afflicted almost every other part of the media landscape.

The thesis Goldblatt unspools in Injury Time is therefore a convincing one: football, as the dominant cultural form in modern Britain, has not only become the “central metaphorical space” in which the country addresses itself, but it has also come to provide a perfect reflective surface. It is in the game, he believes, that we might most clearly see ourselves.

This approach is not new; a whole canon of football literature has emerged in the last few decades that springs from the same realisation. Most of the world’s major footballing nations have been explored through the lens of their football cultures. Franklin Foer and Simon Kuper are among those writers who have used football to explain the whole planet. Most of the time – if not quite all – the basic idea holds up.

Goldblatt’s twist, however, is that his mirror is distorting, the reflection unflattering – a portrait in the attic. His assessment of the state of football’s soul, and by extension, Britain’s, falls somewhere between sombre and downright grim: the game, as he depicts it, is unable to rid itself of racism, hooked on get-rich-quick schemes and willing to sell anything and everything for the right price to the wrong buyer.

It is, in truth, impossible to defend football against the majority of charges levelled by Goldblatt. Too often the sport’s attempts to deal with prejudice border on tokenism. Its governing bodies have, frequently, been too venal and craven to protect what is, in effect, a mass social institution. It has too willingly embraced the idea of eternal growth for its own sake – what the author Jasper Fforde once described as “the philosophy of cancer” – regardless of either the source of the money or the cost attached.

And yet the picture is a little more complex than it first appears. The other major event in football’s summer – along with the glorious, uplifting coda provided by the Lionesses – was the inaugural Fifa Club World Cup, an ersatz tournament that, at times, seemed largely to exist so that the body’s oleaginous president, Gianni Infantino, might ingratiate himself with Donald Trump.

But that was not quite the extent of its purpose. Football, in its modern state, is caught between the competing interests of two distinct factions. On one side are the private equity investors, the mainly American finance houses that have descended on the game with the aim of squeezing every last drop of money from its pores. On the other are the nation states – Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, in particular – who have been drawn to the sport, like moths to the very brightest of flames, because of the unparalleled soft power it offers. The Club World Cup was where the two sides met: a tournament designed to swell the coffers of a handful of teams by packing an already overstuffed calendar yet tighter, bankrolled (indirectly) by Saudi money, embedding the kingdom as the game’s financial engine.

Football has, in effect, outgrown itself; increasingly, the game – its clubs, its competitions, its organisers, its executives, all of them its theoretical guardians – is at the mercy of forces it cannot resist. It has grown so large, so fat and so influential that even as a pandemic raged it became a matter of national importance that games should be played. Goldblatt concludes his dissection of football’s rottenness by examining the sport’s refusal to confront the climate crisis. It is a pressing issue, without question, but also provides the perfect symbol of where the game finds itself in 2025: swept inexorably along to a disaster of its own making, buffeted on all sides by powers now beyond its control.

Injury Time: Football in a State of Emergency by David Goldblatt is published by Mudlark (£22). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £19.80. Delivery charges may apply

Photograph of Donald Trump with Fifa’s president Gianni Infanto at the Fifa Club World Cup final, July 2025, courtesy of Fifa/Getty Images